2022/78: The Apparition Phase -- Will Maclean

Is it more terrifying to believe somewhere is haunted, or to believe that nowhere is? [loc. 3009]

Set firmly in the Seventies, the decade of The Unexplained (part 2 free with part 1!) and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, of The Stone Tape, of ghosts and UFOs and cryptozoology, of ouija boards and Soviet telepaths and flexidiscs of the voices of the dead. Tim and his twin sister Abi grow up in suburbia, fascinated by the supernatural and obsessed with ghosts. When they acquire a camera, they fake a ghost photo and show it to a girl at school: she faints, and though Tim and Abi congratulate themselves they also feel slightly bad. But when they confess to the hoax, Janice doesn't believe them: "You drew a shape on a wall, thinking it was clever, thinking it was funny. But it’s not. And now it’s here. And you live here."

Fast-forward a couple of years, as the twins -- sent to separate schools -- become less codependent. And then Abi goes missing: and Tim ends up at a run-down manor house in Suffolk, with a group of teenagers who are trying to contact the spirit world.

Tremendously atmospheric for anyone who (like me) was a solitary weirdo in the Seventies: I do wonder what younger readers will make of the closely-observed minutae of teenage life during that period. The Apparition Phase is a distinctly British, suburban sort of horror novel, with Tim's class consciousness another way in which he's alienated from his peers (the boys at the manor house call him 'Comprehensive'), and the vividly depicted post-industrial landscape: slow-running ditches sheened with oil and littered with abandoned appliances, sagging wire fences, old tyres, phone boxes that smell of stale cigarettes.

The horror is primarily (though not exclusively) psychological, and the nastiest scenes happen between the lines: the LSD that Tim drops with a bully-turned-friend, Juliet's secret, Abi's fate. Tim is, it becomes clear quite early on, not entirely reliable as a narrator: he isn't exactly likeable but I ended up feeling considerable sympathy for him, and for the ways in which he's failed by the adults in his life. An excellent novel, and a debut: I'll look out for more by Maclean.